Carlo Bordini, "Gestures" / "I gesti"

  
BILINGUAL EDITION (English/Italian) @ Logosfere series (Zona/Quintadicopertina)
of an athology of poems by one of the most important experimental poets in Italy:
Carlo Bordini

http://goo.gl/WCEBz1

     

Blowhards in Philly

Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani was in town tonight, to make an appearance at Geno's Steaks, famous for the sign, "This is America, when ordering speak English." I live just down the street from Geno's, so I went down to snap some photos. The owner of Geno's, Joey Vento, is a little guy with a big attitude. (Vento is Italian for "wind," by the way.) Joey has a Hummer and several Harleys, which he displays in a store front with his confederate flag, Elvis figurine and a Frankenstein manakin wearing a T-shirt that says, "I'm an American, so I order in English." Geno's is a tourist magnet, so it attracts plenty of foreigners, but the sign makes little sense, since what language would anyone order in but English? Of the roughly 6,900 languages in the world, hundreds are endangered, with one disappearing every two weeks. Approximately 600 became extinct in the last century. English is not threatened, obviously. It is the most dominant, most ubiquitous language ever, more than Latin, French or Spanish, so there's no need to harass anyone into learning it. People worldwide are already hounded and seduced into memorizing, at the very least, "Yes. No. Thank you. Sexy. Excuse me. I'm sorry."

[...]

talking with Barry Schwabsky

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and art critic living in London. His publications include Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press), Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press), and The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), as well as contributions to books and catalogues on artists ranging from Henri Matisse and Alighiero Boetti to Jessica Stockholder and Gillian Wearing. He runs the poetry series at Parasol Unit in London. I met Schwabsky last year. When he told me his wife was a banker, I asked him so many questions about economics, we never got around to poetry. I'm making up for that with this conversation:

Linh Dinh: Contemporary American and British poetries don’t overlap much. In the journals of each country, different poets, minor and major, appear. In England, J. H. Prynne is considered a central figure, but he’s barely known in America. Conversely, when I mentioned Michael Palmer to my British friends, many of them didn’t know who he was. Their familiarity with new American poetry ended with John Ashbery and Ron Silliman’s blog, not his poetry. What is your take on this division?

Barry Schwabsky: Yours is an exaggeration based on the truth. My sense of things is that in the '60s and '70s--when people like Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood were emerging poets in the UK--there was a more organic connection between American and British poetries. After that, the so-called mainstream of British poetry became much more conservative, and the poets who represented the "modernist" wing became marginalized. If you look in the poetry section of a good, non-specialized bookstore in London, you'll find very few contemporary American poets and very few contemporary-sounding British poets. What you will find is a lot of poetry that more or less sounds like the Georgian verse that was supposed to have died in the trenches of World War I, only updated in terms of subject matter, so that if it's a male poet he might talk about football (i.e., soccer) or if it's a woman poet she might mention changing nappies (i.e., diapers). But in form, it all seems a century old. So the innovative poets who persist--and there are some very good ones--may be more interested in mutual support at home than looking for alliances across the ocean.

LD: Talking of Raworth, he’s an inspiration to many young poets in Cambridge. They have an excellent reading series, coordinated by Sam Ladkin. He scheduled me with Dublin-based Randolph Healy, who was outstanding, a real discovery for me, and Fiona Sampson, who was, how shall I say this, self-assured in the worst way. She’s the editor of the Poetry Review. Ladkin lumped us all together as a way to build bridges, I think. It had mixed results that night. Sampson irritated Raworth so much he ran straight out of the pub where we had drinks afterwards, after talking to her for maybe a minute. One second he was there, the next, gone. As far as promoting new experimental poetry, Cambridge has to be an exception. Am I wrong?

BS: There seems to be a very close-knit scene in Cambridge, with Prynne as the figurehead but Raworth being quite important too. It's interesting that Sampson was on the bill with you--I think her editorship is seen as a conservative move for Poetry Review. But I'm glad Ladkin is trying to build bridges. Not enough of that goes on here. Things tend to get very polarized.

LD: I went to a poetry reading at a pub in Peckham Rye, an out-of-the-way neighborhood on the South Bank of London, to find the young readers surprisingly good, the crowd enthusiastic. I also attended a pub reading in provincial Norwich, and the place was also hopping with poetry lovers. How would you compare the grass roots poetry scenes in England and the US? Do young, experimental-minded English poets have places to publish? Do they publish themselves?

BS: I may not be the best person to ask. Having lived here for six years, I publish almost exclusively in the US. But my sense is that there are many fewer venues for readings than in New York or the Bay Area. That's one reason why I started the reading series at Parasol Unit--because there didn't seem to be many readings going on, or if they were happening, it was hard to find out about them. My impression was that it was easier to hear new poetry in Cambridge than in London, and that just seemed ass-backwards. Likewise, publication venues seem fewer, and not only in print. The whole online publishing and blogging thing hasn't taken off as energetically here as in the US, though of course it exists. There are a few great presses--Reality Street, Shearsman, and so on--but they don't take on too many young poets. Barque is a significant press but following a very particular line. Things feel a lot less fluid than in the US.

LD: Ron Silliman irritated many Brits when he observed that the number of “island poets with an ear that makes sense to a Yank auditory canal is exceptionally small: perhaps, in the past century, just four—Bunting, Turnbull, Raworth, Thomas A. Clark. This is not to fault others – from J. H. Prynne to David Jones to Douglas Oliver or Allen Fisher—whose ears may well make perfect sense on their own terms, but who don’t, how shall I say this, travel well on at least that one level.” The hostility towards England in the comment section also surprised me. Many Americans have an aversion to France, I know, but I didn’t know they’re also down on Mother England. What do you make of these auditory differences between American and island English? It’s not like we’re talking about Jamaica here, but even then, so what? As a gatecrasher, boatperson and wetback, I’m all for deforming English, buggering, dyeing and polluting it, even with all the mumbling, slurring, fucked up dialects spoken in England.

BS: I might not agree with Ron's list--mine would be a bit longer--but in principal I agree. Here's something I wrote in a review of a book by Simon Smith, whose poetry fits my ear like a charm: "Before I moved to London from New York a few years ago I had little acquaintance with contemporary poetry in England. Yes, I knew Lee Harwood’s work pretty well, and Geoffrey Hill’s too; Tom Raworth’s rather less so. I’d read Christopher Logue’s "accounts" of Homer and, because I’d liked Christopher Middleton’s translations from the German, a bit of his own poetry as well. J.H. Prynne was more than just a rumor to me, certainly, but not a lot more. Of younger poets, I knew nothing. Only after I’d arrived did my ignorance strike me as odd. I began trying to catch up with my new context but quickly saw it wouldn’t be easy. A lot of British poetry was and is hard for me to 'hear' even when I can see that it is good. Reading it could be something like reading poetry in a foreign language one happens to know quite well." It's not a question of hostility! But you have to make a different kind of effort--well worth it in the case of Prynne and Fisher and many others. And I suppose they have to make the same kind of effort to really "hear" much of our poetry. It would be interesting if someone could get sufficiently analytical about this to analyze it as a historical development. I hear the great poets up through Wordsworth and Coleridge without making any particular allowance for their Britishness, but somehow by the latter 19th century a split has taken place--the difference between Whitman and Dickinson on the one hand and Browning and Tennyson on the other is very great. And the difference has been there ever since. Didn't Wallace Stevens write, "Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility"?

LD: Are you in danger of not making sense, soon, to the folks back home?

BS: Maybe it's more dangerous to make the wrong kind of sense. In any case, I think being here has been great for my poetry. I'm sure I'll never take on a British ear, just as in speaking I don't take on a British accent, but I hear my own accent in a slightly estranged manner now. What's natural to me now sounds a bit artificial. Which makes the poetry in everyday language shine through so much brighter!


*Upcoming readings at Parasol Unit: March 3th, Peter Cole and Tony Lopez; March 29th, Lyn Hejinian and Barett Watten; June 5th, Michael Glover and Ernesto Priego.

Original Ladies’ Man

Before the absolute hegemony of English, sailors, as the only frequent travellers, were primitive, grunting polyglots. Columbus, for example, was said to speak "a thousand languages badly." With Genoan as his mother tongue, he wrote in a Portuguese-inflected Spanish, sprinkled with Italian and Latin. Like other sea dogs, he was also conversant in lingua franca, at the time a combination of all the Romance languages, mixed with Arabic, Greek and Turkish. Using few pronouns, fewer prepositions and a pared down syntax, no past tense, barely a future, lingua franca was a negotiated, constantly evolving medium that allowed disparate peoples to communicate without screaming and gesticulating, to haggle, make love, or at least take turns on the dame de voyage after sharing a hunk of moldy cheese. Lingua franca's role was diminished when one culture asserted dominion over another. Unlike sailors, soldiers of an occupying army are rarely disposed to negotiate with the locals, in any language. They learn few foreign words, if any, but the quaint, sullen natives must understand, at the very least, "Stop!" and "Don't move!"

Nearly three milion U.S. soldiers served in Vietnam, but they stole no Vietnamese words. Why should they? "Tet" is included in many American dictionaries, but you never hear it in conversations. In 1988, Yusef Komunyakaa, a Vietnam War vet, published a poetry book, Dien Cai Dau. Literally, "Crazy the Head," it's an exclamation of exasperation, I'm driven insane, điên cái đầu! What's the Arabic equivalent, I wonder?

Stop! Don't move! Ti mi hazer venir pazzo! You're driving me nuts! Hanging out with the U.S.A., Vietnamese have absorbed a few English words. In 1998, I found myself in Can Tho, the chief city in the Mekong Delta. Sitting in a cafe near the large, goofy Ho Chi Minh statue, I saw a gaggle of swishy young men marching down the street. The way they swivelled their hips would make Little Richard proud. “Ladiman!” the man at the next table exclaimed.

I had never heard that word. “What’s a ladiman?”

“Gay. They’re gay. They’re ladiman!”

The common Vietnamese term for a male homosexual is either bê đê, from the French pédé, or bóng, a word meaning both “shadow” and “shiny.” There is also the slang hi-fi, stereo sexuality, I suppose, and a play on the term hai phái, dual genders. It took me a moment to figure out that ladiman is a corruption of the English expression “ladies’ man.” Reincarnated as a Vietnamese slang, its meaning has been inverted, from a heterosexual stud to a half-and-half, a lady/man.

Many English words adopted into Vietnamese are merely technical: radio, TV, video, computer, fax... Others, military: xe tăng [tank], bom [bomb], na pan [napalm], mìn [mine]...

Constantly on the lips of the young set is mô đen [modern], meaning “stylish” or “hip,” as in, “My sister is so mô đen, she only listens to róc [rock], rap and jazz. She only wears imported jean[s].”

One peculiar transplant is lô gích [logic]. The logic for incorporating a foreign word is to introduce a new object or idea. Why do Vietnamese import “logic,” when they already have lý luận? For cachet purposes, I suppose, the same reason why Italian restaurants in the U.S. are dubbed “ristorante.”

Unlike French, which has given Vietnamese ragu [ragout], bơ [beure], phô ma [fromage], sà lách [salade], phở [pot-au-feu], sô cô la [chocolat], bánh gatô [gateaux], bánh flan [flan], paté, paté chaud, and yaourt, almost no American food names have made it into Vietnamese. The handful of street stalls in Saigon advertising "hot dog" peddle a forlorn-looking Vienna sausage, served without mustard or ketchup.

Cocktail, often spelled cooktail, is a non-alcoholic mixed fruit drink. A cao bồi [cowboy] is a hoodlum. Mít tinh [meeting] means a street demonstration. Mátxa [massage] has illicit connotations which the traditional đấm bóp (literally: “punch and squeeze”) does not. Bê bi is just a baby, but má mi [mommy] is a madame in a whore house.

When someone is kicking back with a bia to enjoy a phim sếch, he’s nursing a cold one while rinsing his eyes with a sex video, which leads us to o li zin, from the English “origin.” Not a noun in Vietnamese but an adjective, this word means, curiously enough, “virginal.”

“Are you o li zin?”

“Yes, I am still a virgin.”

“Are you a ladiman?”

“No, I am a ladies’ man.”

Even “American” has been reshaped in the Vietnamese lexicon. In 1995, as I was walking on a Saigon street--literally, since there was no room on the sidewalk--a cyclo driver, pedaling alongside, hassled me relentlessly to ride in his cab. Despite my repeated refusals, he nagged on.

"Where are you from?" The guy asked.

It's my least favorite question. I didn't answer him.

"Where are you from?" He repeated.

Again I ignored him.

"You are a Nacirema," he decided, and pedaled away.

Nacirema is American spelled backward. He was right. I am a backward American.

talking with Marianne Villanueva

In 2005, Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt [House of World Cultures] hosted a festival of Southeast Asian arts and literatures. Organized by Lydia Haustein and Sven Arnold, it was an eye-opening experience not just for audiences but participants, Southeast Asians who had to come to Berlin to catch up on the latest trends in painting, sculpture, video, poetry and fiction in their home region. There was so much going on, so many people to talk to, one week was not enough. (As someone who wrote in Vietnamese as well as English, I was invited as a Vietnamese poet.) One person I didn’t quite get a chance to talk to was Marianne Villanueva. Born in Manila, she lives in San Francisco and is the author of Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (1991) and Mayor of the Roses (2005), and co-editor of Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas (2003). I emailed her recently to ask her about Filipino poetry:

Linh Dinh: How many languages do Filipino poets write in?

Marianne Villanueva: They write in as many languages as there are dialects in the Philippines (over 80). But only the English-writing poets get published abroad or in Manila.

LD: What's distinctive about Filipino poetry?

MV: I would like to say lyricism. It's an emotional poetry. I feel that we absorbed a lot of our emotionality from the Spanish. At the same time, there is also this tremendous facility in English that we find in any college graduate from the Philippines. Romantic poetry doesn't interest me, but that seems to be in our nature because we have these great examples of lyrical love poetry from our past. The Filipino poets that really interest me, however, are the ones who seem to want to explore language, who are playful. I think of R. Zamora Linmark and Luisa Igloria, two of my favorites, who are nevertheless so different from each other. And Conchitina Cruz, a young Filipina with an MFA from University of Pittsburgh. She writes these very intricate constructs, prose poems really, that play with form a lot. (One poem by her is white space and then a footnote; the only text is in the footnote.) But I don't read Tagalog poetry, which is a great loss. I grew up when English was the medium of instruction, from kindergarten to college, and where it was a matter of great pride to speak "straight English." And I feel bad that I can't read Tagalog poetry. Or, for that matter, Cebuano poetry. Or Ilocano poetry. Because there are poets who write in these languages, but who stay in the provinces and aren't even published because the presses in Manila are very oriented towards the West and are very urbanized and aren't interested in poets in our rural areas.

I think that these poets, who write in dialects like Cebuano, Ilonggo, are following in a very rich tradition. We don't have regional writing workshops that encourage these kinds of poets. There is only the University of the Philippines writing workshop, which draws from the Manila poets.

LD: Having been colonized by Spain and the U.S., how does Filipino poetry relate to Spanish and American poetries?

MV: I have read a lot of poets who make it a point to address colonization, and its detrimental effects on our identity. I don't think those are our most successful poets. I think, with regards to American poetry, Filipino poets are finding an increasing audience here, as witness poets like Eugene Gloria, who had a book out a few months ago from Penguin; and Barbara Jane Reyes, who won a big award from the Academy of American Poets. But I don't see that these poets have much in common with each other, really. I can't say there is a distinctive Filipino style of poetry, unless it's the poetry of our love ballads.

LD: Who are the major Filipino poets writing right now?

MV: OK, Nick Carbo is very successful, and Barbara Jane Reyes is becoming so. There are many fine younger poets, like Maiana Minahal, and Arlene Biala. I got to know their work when I was putting together Going Home to a Landscape. Maiana and Arlene both have books out, but they are not very well known, which is a real pity. Luisa Igloria is a major poet; she teaches at Old Dominion University, but she began writing back home in the Philippines, and her writing straddles both worlds: the Philippines and the U.S.. Landscape is a very strong component in her poetry.

There is also Joel B. Tan, a Filipino Chinese whose work is searing and raw and painful and truly unforgettable. He has a book, Monster, that didn't get much distribution but it's a powerful powerful book. And he has a manusript, Type O Negative, which I've read, which just blows me away. A narrative of growing up, in the most painful circumstances imaginable, but told in verse form. There you have the fact of being an ethnic minority within a larger community and the feelings of isolation—also, the fact that he is gay and the shame he felt, when he was growing up.

R. Zamora (Zack) Linmark is important because his writing straddles the worlds of poetry and prose. He has a very distinctive voice, employs pidgin a lot (He grew up in Hawaii but lives half the time now in Manila), and wrote a fantastic voice-driven novel (parts of this are like prose poetry), Rolling the R's. The Filipino presence in Hawaii is problematic—they are supposedly the "lowest" of all the Asian groups in Hawaii. Zack grew up poor, and his poetry is about what it's like to grow up poor, gay, and Filipino in Hawaii. He also writes political poetry, but in a completely irreverent way, which I enjoy.

LD: With so many Filipinos living abroad, please describe the relationship between stay-at-home poets and those of the Filipino diaspora?

MV: I don't think there's much of a relationship, really. I'm not sure how welcoming stay-at-home poets are to the ones who have moved away. I think there's a sense that the ones who go to the States have cut themselves off, but it's really the ones who stay at home who cut them off. I know I feel this when I go home—this feeling that I'm being excluded, even though I feel so very very Filipino, and always describe myself as Filipina rather than as "Filipino American."

LD: One thing I've noticed in Filipino literature, the little I've read, is the hip factor. Filipinos know how to be hip, they know how to subvert (American) pop culture. Thai writers also. I'll conjecture that Thai and Filipino writers have a more seasoned, complex response to American cultural hegemony. That's why they're hip. Vietnamese are still going gaga over their fake pairs of Levi's, thanks to the isolation they experienced after the war. Your comments?

MV: The "hipness" factor: yes, Filipinos are absolutely obsessed with being hip. At bottom, we're all entertainers. It's like, if there was an American Idol [a television singing contest] for international poetry, and the only criteria was who could "perform" best, I think Filipinos would win hands-down! The hipness is very facile, and doesn't interest me at all. We've always been great mimics, we are chameleons, another legacy of our mixed-up colonial past.

One poet who is hip, who does fascinate me, is R. Zamora Linmark. His poetry comes out of an impulse to explore what it is in the Filipino psyche that makes us such—"bastards" of world culture!

You'll notice that in spite of our being so "hip", we are still largely invisible, that is, as a writing community. When compared to the Chinese Americans—who have their powerhouses, Amy Tans and Gish Jens, and even the Vietnamese Americans, who have you—and by the way, you are very very hip, so how do you do it? I mean, your hipness is not facile at all!

Maybe you are asking the wrong person because I personally am not hip (if you asked anyone in the Filipino community who they would rather read, me or some other person, I guarantee you 99.9% of the time they would choose the other person. I am so lame that I finally had to start my own blog, which has helped me enormously to figure out what I am really about).

LD: Talking about the (supposed) absence of Filipino powerhouses, you forgot Jessica Hagedorn! She's one, no? She opened vistas for me.

MV: I am not forgetting Jessica Hagedorn. I deliberately kept her out of the conversation because she is the one everyone refers to when they talk about Filipino literature. But I admire Jessica a lot. Dogeaters is a great book. And she literally saved me when she picked my story, "Lenox Hill, December 1991," to be in the anthology, Charlie Chan is Dead. Until then, no one had known I could write like that. One critic in Manila, whose name I've forgotten (ha ha ha!) said my first book, Ginseng, was like Jessica's (because I dealt with politics in that book) but with "a light touch.” There is another writer I enormously admire: Ninotchka Rosca. Her first book, The Monsoon Collection, published in Australia, literally changed my life. The writers I read now, who influence me a lot, are: Luisa Igloria, R. Zamora Linmark, Joel B. Tan.

LD: I noticed that you made no distinction between Filipino and Filipino-American literatures. This blurring is possible because both groups are writing in English. The same cannot be said of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American literatures. All of the Filipino writers you've mentioned are also living in the U.S., so they are, or could easily be considered, American writers. Next question: in Berlin, the Filipino ambassador showed up at your presentation and had a rather testy exchange with you. I was surprised that she bothered to come, and even more surprised she had strong opinions about contemporary poetry. I didn't see any Vietnamese diplomat when I was talking, although they might have sent a spy or two, to sprinkle anthrax onto my wiener schnitzel. What's your take on the episode with your ambassador?

MV: The Ambassador came to my reading at the invitation of my mother, who knows her. My mother is very famous in the Philippines. She has played in Berlin as a concert pianist. She's like a cultural ambassador, playing all over the world. I had never met this Ambassador in my life, and when she walked in, with her whole entourage, I had a gut feeling we would not see eye-to-eye. I mean, just the arrogance of her coming with all those hangers-on! Later, when I had dinner with her, she was very condescending (to her German driver) and talked about the other people on the panel in a very insulting way, and then blew smoke in my face the whole time I was eating, so that my eyes teared up and I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I had to have dinner with her because, in spite of everything, she had come at my mother's invitation, and I was worried about my mom getting some backlash if I turned her down. Perhaps subconsciously, I was hoping to extract a story from the disaster. She doesn't know anything about literature.


Four poems by R. Zamora Linmark, from his forthcoming collection, The Evolution of a Sigh:


DORIS DAY & NIGHT EATERY

ADULTS: 50 PESOS; CHILDREN: 25 PESOS; CADAVERS: SUBJECT TO NEGOTIATION, signboard nailed onto the Superferry kiosk in Cebu.

BLOCK & WHITE, best-selling skin-whitening cream. “IT BLOCKS THE SUN AND WHITENS THE SKIN.”

CONDO UNITS FOR RENT: FULLY & HALF-FURNACED.

DORIS DAY & NIGHT EATERY.

ee plumbings, chief rival of Christopher Plumbing.

FELIX THE CUT SALON, located right beside to SINE QUA NON convenient store.

GO INN, love motel with early bird specials from 5 to 11 a.m.

HIT & RUN: “WE ONLY SELL AUTHENTIC IMPORTED ROBBER SHOES.”

“IT’S CHEW GOOD TO BE TRUE,” ad for Kaboom bubble gum.

JINKY’S FUNERARIA & BEAUTY SALON: “WE MAKE UP THE DEAD TOO.”

LET’S TALK DIRTY, a laundromat like LABA DABA DOO and WASHING WELL.

Mid-March Midnight Madness sale at WALTER MART.

NUNCHALANT BAKERY: “WE PRAY WHILE WE KNEAD.”

OVID’S ORGANIC CLINIC naturally treats Hepatitis, TB, AIDS, Leukemia, Leptospirosis, Meningitis, Venereal Warts, Malaria, Toothache and other Tropical Depression.

PLEASE URINE ONLY; NO SHITTING; TOILET NOT IN ORDER.

QUEENIE’S MODERN ANTIQUE FURNITURE: “WE MAKE THE NEW LOOK OLD.”

RIBISCO, Philippines’s answer to Nabisco.

SONNY & SHEARS also owns SCISSORS PALACE.

THE WAY WE WEAR: “HOME OF WEAR-TO-GO FASHION.”

UPON ENTERING MALACANANG PALACE: PLEASE DEPOSIT ALL FIREARMS & CELLULAR PHONES.

VIANDE MEATROPOLIS, a deli.

WANTED: BOY WAITRESS

XERXES ULYSSES BALMIDIANO: DRESSMAKER.

YOLANDA’S YODEL: “ENROLL NOW AND BE THE NEXT JULIE ANDREWS. SWISS-CERTIFIED.”

ZACHARIAS’S PHOTOGRAPHY: “WE SHOOT YOU WHILE YOU WAIT.”


Morning Rushes

Post-exile Odysseus said, “Shit.
The world is still cut-and-paste.”

* * *

Pass me the salt,
My wig is on fire.

* * *

SPAM on sale at Longs,
Have you seen my husband?

* * *

I heard a fly –
Hush: trees are in session

* * *

UNDRINKABLE sign.
Induce Barthes if swallowed.

* * *

Tetanus-proofed tilapias;
What color is my panty?

* * *

Thousand-year long noodles,
Read Japanese backwards.

* * *

Keep left cow elevated
If burnt toast recurs.

* * *

Virgin Mary live at six
Apply Foucault.


Our Ek in Filipino Gayspeak

Your love for me: is it truly wa na as in was to the wiz power?
Or are you just wishy-washing with my mind?
Because it feels like your heart doesn’t dub to my lub
as a-flang a-fla-flu a-falangganita to my pharynx as before.
It’s only obvious you’re doing the sunken, but not in my garden.
You’ve stopped spooning my sleep and making special effects and other che-ness.
You don’t even fish-filet me up anymore
or make chika-dee como chikadora over my chicken drumsticks
fried extra crispy a la K to the F to the C.
And I’m not etching either, or making ka ek ekan when I tell you
the last time we touched you pulled the flying trapeze kiyeme on me.
You came, yes, but in dew drops, and like a mouse muzzled in Dolby.
Cha-ring! as in Charito Solis I’m not; may she rest in peace.
If only I had the time and all the ek in the world
I’d spell out each and every chuva, chenilyn, and che che boreche.
But it’s only minutes until I become just another Holy Week celebrity.
Crayola me a river na lang, and say va-voo and chuva-chu.


Psst

Means hey it’s just me thinking of you
as usual about us in this crowded train
where I know just about everyone is whispering
I’m your heart’s biggest yesterday’s hit and
your world’s worst blind spot right now
they can read my face today’s tragic news you
haven’t been waking up on our side of the world
it won’t be long now before you leave me
just like that Billie Holiday song say it isn’t so
so I’m going home try and not cry especially
the part where Billie half-wails how
everything is still okay because you’re still my
every still my everything even when
the door grows tired of my hurt my only


*Nick Carbo just edited an Asian American issue of Mipoesias. Among those featured are Filipino-American poets Luis H. Francia, Eric Gamalinda, Luba Halicki, Paolo Javier, Joseph O. Legaspi, Mike Maniquiz, Lani T. Montreal, Oliver de la Paz, Barbara Jane Reyes, Eileen R. Tabios, Joel B. Tan and Marlon Unas Esguerra.

Speaking in Tongues

As is well known, James Joyce moved from Ireland to Switzerland, then Italy, back to Switzerland, then finally France. His daughter, Lucia, was famously described as being "illiterate in three languages." It was actually four: Italian, her native tongue, spoken at home, English, German and French. With more people displaced than ever, many living in their third or fourth country, the world is full of Lucia Joyces, those who are not quite at home in any language, but have a loose command of three or four. If they decided to write, what sort of literature would they produce? Composing with a borrowed tongue, they could become hyper-conscious and write in an ultra-correct, conservative style. Or they could let go and act like a drunk tourist, an intoxicated interloper. Such seems to be the case of Nguyen Ducmanh. Born in Vietnam, he came to France as a teenager, traipsed around Europe, married a Finnish woman, then moved to New York. His English prose, always manic, reckless, often ungrammatical, sprinkled with serendipitous malapropisms, mixes the truly awful with sudden brilliances. (His poetry I find not as satisfying. Forced into linebreaks, conscious of forms, he's neutered.) There are only two examples of Nguyen Ducmanh's prose online, here and here. At its best, it does sing like poetry. Some excerpts:

Walking through the petrified forest called life beside the women, I did some metiers to enhance my status: street vendor, typographer, bar-boy, busboy, very good waiter, very snob maitre d', remnants baler lost 25 pounds in no time... ouch for my hernia, barkeeper make good money sending son to Lycee Francais but every medal has 2 faces: John Barley corn got hold of my finance, body, soul and spirit! ...taxi driver, yellow cab (holder of a world record never equal in earth life time: 5 summons issued in one day) ... artist in residence, designer of the Gaelic alphabet (15 letters) in calligraphy and in the tree language, art teacher, gigolo, 3 cushions billiard shooter, nom de guerre "chinito pollo" and do art 4000 year backward.

she is late, as Mohammed said : If the Mount Chauve don't come to me, I come to the mountain. Her chambre de bonne was all dark few candles, all veils, incenses. I had a twinge inside, spooky feeling that my head is on the block for the guillotine or I am a lamb sacrify for the black mass; but when I gave a leer to her kimono ajar, then I know I am for a voyage with no return to the moon! Her complexion scented of saffron and almond, her boobies: 2 tangerines, a bony corps like a young boy. Her name is Dagmar Webb. 32 springs, father Gaelic, mother walkyrie and...here I go ompahpah for the souper du roi! Mouth to mouth, I am into her lips as 2 ripped Corinthian raisins, her Pandora box flesh smells a faint air of gorgonzola mama mia, c'est si bon then I gave my life in her petit trou. The battle lasts all night, I was not quite free through and...

You do something in Paris: jalousie they hate it then you do nada they call you a schmuck so the alternative is suppuku... n'est-ce-pas!

I think big but I paint petit because manqué of space; the most largest I could produce is 2' x 3' here at the land of abbondanza

fluid of her pisseuse stacked it to my hair, ears all over my fuck face. I am late for work, can not fresh up myself just a giggle of brandy; then I jumped to the bus cross-town. While try find a big lie to say where I was last night, the woman sat next to me beheaded me with her look, then I realize that my BO stinks oozed out odor of copulation, or Roucoulous cheese; but the girl standing in front of me: see me with an accomplice eye, the way she sways her hips like she dumps her steak tartar at my kisser!

Dime, baby, la razón

I’ve just spent two months on the Texas-Mexico border, where reggaetón rules the airwave, at least among the young. What strikes me about this music is how easily and naturally English is woven into the Spanish lyrics. Since many of the singers and listeners are bilingual, this should come as no surprise. Here’s a snatch from the Puerto Rican Daddy Yankee:

Yes yo, tu sabes quien tiene el best flow
El dueño y señor del mambo
Me piden crema y la suelto
Yo baby let’s mambo

Living and breathing English, subjugated, we all have at least a smattering of English flourishing and festering, erecting condos in our brain cells. For Daddy Yankee, it has become second nature. What’s disturbing to me are instances where English-babbling subjects at the furthest reaches of Empire still feel compelled to drop a latinated anglo saxon into their literary labor. Consider, for example, these brief poems by the Vietnamese Nam Di:

Occasionally

không thể khóc nấc lên
nghe có vẻ giả tạo
cũng không thể khóc âm thầm
chẳng hiểu vì sao
chỉ thi thoảng
lắng nghe đâu đó
trong đêm
tiếng những giọt nước rơi


Uncertainty

Không gì tệ bằng sự không chắc chắn
về mình - về người - về mọi điều
Nó làm ta có cảm giác rơi xuống
rơi xuống với tốc độ
dù chậm chạp hay chóng mặt
vẫn khó thể gượng dậy

Không gì tệ bằng cảm giác rơi xuống
Nhói ở tim và buốt các mạch máu
cảm giác mất thăng bằng
về mình - về người - về mọi điều
Nó làm ta không thể định vị
dù nhắm mắt hay
mở trừng nhìn


As you can see, only her titles are in English, nothing else. I suppose that the use of English in a non-English poem is justified when you want to evoke a specifically English, American, Kiwi or Belizean reality, etc. Otherwise, dime, baby, la razón?